I did it! I have a new professional web site, and it's live: www.brianziman.com. I've migrated the other server from lighttpd to nginx, and instead of antique php, the new system is using jetty. It's almost like I've dragged myself into 2019! With a little bit more work, hopefully I'll be able to get the rest of my online world into the current century.

I pulled the trigger and retired early! Yesterday was my last day at Google, and my last day living in Boulder. I've hit the road, and the first stop is skiing in Steamboat Springs. Now that I'm retired, I'll have plenty of time to drag this site into the 21st century, and to work on a bunch of other projects I've been saving up over the years. Stay tuned...

Well, 2016 has not been a good year. I've just finished the Star Wars VII and most of a bottle of tequila in an effort to commemorate Carrie Fisher's untimely passing. Many people seem to be anxious to see the end of a year filled with loss and tragedy. Personally, I don't see any hope for a brighter 2017. After all, everyone that died this year will still be dead next year, and on top of that, we'll have to suffer through the consequences of the November election.

Well shit, I just learned that Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down, has ALSO died. At least he was really old.

So anyway, all these great people will still be dead in 2017. And we have only more war and poverty to look forward to. I must say I'm a little concerned - bread and circuses can only last so long. In any case, I'm not looking forward to 2017.

So Elaine and I had caviar as part of our New Years feast, the other night. I had picked up some "Caviar Russe" brand caviar at Whole Foods that was labeled "Siberian Osetra". Turns out that this isn't actually Osetra, but rather a different species of Sturgeon, Acipenser baerii. They get away with calling it "Osetra", because apparently, that's the generic word for Sturgeon in Russian. We really liked it, but I had rather hoped for actual Osetra - A. gueldenstaedtii.

So today, hoping to take advantage of any post-holiday discounts, I went back to Whole Foods and picked up several other varieties of caviar, along with a bottle of Moet et Chandon Champagne. (There were no discounts to be had, however.)

They were actually out of the "Siberian Osetra" that we had the other night, but they ended up having actual Osetra, which was labeled "Caspian Osetra", even though it was sustainably farmed in Germany, rather than wild caught in the Caspian. I suppose that's good, because A. gueldenstaedtii is critically endangered in the wild.

I also picked up what was labeled "American Caviar", also called Pacific or White Sturgeon, A. transmontanus, which was also sustainably farmed in Germany.

Those were both Caviar Russe brand caviar. They seem sort of cavalier with their branding, since their Russian Osetra isn't actually Osetra, and their Caspian Osetra and American Caviar are both from Germany!

To round out the comparison, I also picked up some American Paddlefish roe, Polyodon spathula, which is not sturgeon, but closely related, and often times passed for cheaper "caviar". Though at Whole Foods, it was just as expensive as the real stuff.

As a caviar expert might predict, we didn't really enjoy the Paddlefish roe. It just wasn't as good as the others in texture or flavor (and I did a blind test for Elaine, asking her what she thought of each, presented identically, before sharing which was which).

Of the more expensive caviar, we actually preferred the American Caviar to the similarly priced "Siberian Osetra", and while the actual Osetra was very good, we preferred both the American and Siberian to the A. gueldenstaedtii, which was considerably more expensive than the two we preferred.

So I guess the conclusion is that we prefer real caviar to fake, and that the more expensive caviar is not necessarily the caviar that we like the best.

We also agree that we prefer a sweeter bubbly to a fine brut Champagne, no matter what the experts think you should serve with caviar.

I haven't posted here in forever. I fear that it is because most of my trivial thoughts go up on Facebook, where it can be mined for advertising dollars, and deleted on the whim of a soulless west coast organization.

On the one hand, I could add all the features I want to swisspig.net, but on the other hand, I know no one actually reads this... unless I write something useful that people will find in web search results. This is not one of those posts.

I think the trivial event that prompted this post is that I wanted to brag about a hike I did in Boulder yesterday afternoon - from Broadway up to Ridge Drive... about two miles walking, and up about a thousand feet in elevation. The trail started by Foothills Community Park, and connected to Old Kiln Spur. It was really pretty, until it got dark. I sort of forgot that the time change would lead to it being significantly darker there than it was when I was looking at the hike on Friday. Lesson learned.

Well, that explains the recent lack of traffic... a change I made to my blogging engine a few days ago caused a fairly catastrophic failure of most of my site, which I somehow failed to notice, until Google's Webmaster Tools sent me an e-mail, explaining to me that I'm an idiot.

Recently, I made a chance that parsed some data as PHP, instead of just as plain text, so I could use some variables set in that PHP, without having to parse it manually. Unfortunately, I forgot that there were a bunch of other places that were still parsing it manually. So I fixed this, which will definitely improve performance. But for some reason, the include was still failing for certain pages... turns out that this code is executed before another necessary include file was included. It took quite a lot of tracing, but I tracked it down, and it is now corrected.

This morning's pain and suffering is a strong indicator that my first casual attempt at PHP — also known as the complete blogging engine for swisspig.net, may be due for a rewrite. I may keep it in PHP, but it will definitely need to be completely object oriented going forward, and I may need to bite the bullet and actually store a bit more data in the database, rather than as flat text. It will be ages before the rewrite happens — it'll probably coincide with my abandoning of Rackspace Cloud (who REALLY suck), which has been planned for years now, and still hasn't happened.

As I sit here watching the Capitol Fourth on PBS, I find myself reflecting on the same things I reflect on each Independence Day. This show has a tendency to remind me of all of the ways that my country and fellow citizens disappoint me. I know it is reasonable for the propaganda machine to go full force on the one national holiday, and that doesn't so much bother me - after all, many of the claims in your average patriotic song were at least nominally true at one point. But the patriotic music and the reminders of our nation's history just bring to mind our current shortcomings.

We talk about our soldiers "fighting for freedom", but the reality is our soldiers fighting overseas are fighting for corporate profits for companies like Lockheed, Boeing, and Raytheon. The people fighting against us in the Middle East are fighting for their own freedom against a foreign imperial government, every bit as much as George Washington fought against the British over two hundred years ago. We may not agree with their ideals, but it's disingenuous to claim we're fighting for "freedom", since they pose no threat to us, and if one group is subjugating another, when we're done with them, it'll be the same, just the other way around. The only benefit is in the military contractors who profit from all the war and destruction.

They did a nice little montage of "This Land is Your Land", and another included Miss Piggy dressed as the Statue of Liberty. You may recall the inscription on the statue: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breath free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door." I'm embarrassed at the way Americans treat immigrants and all people who want to come here to make a better life for themselves - you sneer at fifteen people living in a small townhouse, who work as day laborers for three dollars an hour, but you have no idea what they came from - huts made of scrap metal and no indoor plumbing. They aren't parasites looking for a handout. They are willing to work hard, to do things that are "beneath" your average self-entitled American, and do it for next to no pay... and then send half of that pay back to their families who couldn't escape the squalor that they were lucky enough to be able to. Americans waste enough food to feed every hungry person on the planet. But Americans scream about "illegals" taking their jobs and lowering wages. They want to build fences, and have mass deportations. The reality is that having people treated as "illegal" opens them up to victimization, since they can't go to the police for protection without fear of deportations - but they certainly pay taxes and allow you to enjoy the low prices you pay for many services. But they don't get any of the basic protections that any human should enjoy. Where would you be, if your family hadn't been welcomed here, or at least tolerated long enough to become safely established?

I love my country - there's no place on Earth that is founded on the liberties that America was founded on. It's just sad that so many people have forgotten where we came from. Peace, equality, tolerance, and opportunities for everyone. Not warmongering, corruption, and hatred. Happy Independence Day.

Yesterday was my 52-week anniversary at Google, and today is my calendar year anniversary. I still can't quite believe that I managed to get hired by Google and relocate to Colorado, and I'm even more amazed that after a year at Google, they actually still seem to want me around. It's pretty much everything that the rumors say, and everything that I expected, and pretty much everything that I wanted. About the only down-side is that I'm having a bear of a time getting my friends recruited — come on, guys! How hard is it to program your way through an interview? The one person I successfully recruited actually managed to start before me, so of course, I don't get a referral bonus for that one!

Really, the only disappointment has been that I'm on a team of grown-ups with families who don't party as much as Googlers have a reputation for. I've been told that Boulder Googlers are a bit more restrained than their Mountain View counterparts, and that my group is particularly mature. And while I'd love to party more, it's probably for the best that I don't have as many excuses to be irresponsible.

Here's hoping that Google and I continue to work happily together for many years to come.